Hi,
2008/2/27, Attila Kinali <attila at kinali.ch>:
> On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:54:30 +0000
> M?ns Rullg?rd <mans at mansr.com> wrote:
>> > > I can not say that i agree or disagree here, just that i have some
> > > doubt. Also the word "intelligent" is a little vague, what is intelligence?
> > > I think that the word "educated" fits better.
> >
> > Educated implies intelligent, while the converse is not true. An
> > intelligent person is able to make rational decisions without being
> > educated. Education is nothing but a convenience.
>> I beg to differ. Education and intelligence are IMHO orthogonal.
> You can be very well educated, know a lot of things, but fail
> at drawing conclusions from this knowledge (ie be the typical
> university student who has just learnt various things from books,
> but has no clue what they mean). All the same you can be very
> intelligent, but have know knowledge whatsoever.
>> > When faced with a decision, it need not be immediately obvious to all
> > involved, due to factors such as differing background knowledge, which
> > alternative is the better. If a vote is held, people are forced to
> > make a choice, even if they have insufficient information available to
> > make the best one (by whatever metric). This essentially introduces a
> > random element in the decision making process. A thorough discussion
> > allows people to consider aspects they may have been previously
> > unaware of, and entirely new solutions may be discovered. If memory
> > serves, such things happen regularly around here.
>> Actually consensus is my prefered way of making decissions. Unfortunately
> it requires that everyone involved has a similar goal, similar knowledge
> (ie the fields of knowledge shouldn't be disjoint), is able to
> learn from each other and accept different point of views.
>> This makes creating a consensus among larger groups very challenging
> if not impossible (confer also "Dunbars number").
>> > The less information the voting population has, the more random the
> > outcome will be. An extreme example is that of a modern country,
> > where people on average have limited access to accurate information,
> > while being bombarded with propaganda (the situation is worst among
> > members of parliament). This results in almost completely random
> > decisions being made, and instead of the steady progress we like to
> > imagine our society making, we get something best described as
> > Brownian motion. The situation is further worsened by the fact that
> > the population rarely shares a common goal.
>> That's the reason why modern democracies do not work anyomre.
> It was very hard to be up to date on the various issues in
> a country in the past, mostly because it was hard to get
> the information. But these days it's nearly impossible to
> have a good overview over most of the issues within a country
> because there is so much information that it is impossible
> to "process" all of it.
>> I'm not sure what would be the best form of goverment in
> the modern enviroment, but it is definitly not democracy.
But it's definitely better than other known forms. :-)
--
Zuxy
Beauty is truth,
While truth is beauty.
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